Coincidentally, I think I assigned a form of remediation to my classes on Monday. College Board’s Springboard program for grade 12 requires visual literacy that students have–up until this year at least–not been accustomed to learning or using. the program asks them to understand visual symbols and choices in space/layout to make an argument or develop a point of analysis. To that end, we analyze art and then we analyze literature with similar choices in symbol or structure. On Monday, I asked students to analyze one of three selected Salvador Dali paintings.
For the sake of time, I’ll focus my discussion on one of Dali’s first paintings, the last one in the sequence entitled “Young Woman at a Window” (1925). Now, in my class up until this point, we’ve studied the window as a symbol as a psychological symbol. We’ve talked about how that symbol intrudes on most creative forms (windows in books, poems, movies, tv shows). We’ve read Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and spent a full class period reading into the window scene of that story. We’ve spoken about both voyeurism & the gaze as well while reading Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit. We’ve looked at how the window plays a role in our visual narratives as well. I’ll let you take a look at some of the scenes we’ve examined.
Anyway, back to my assignment, using what we’ve spoken about in class and using Dali’s artwork, I asked the students to write an ekphrastic poem. Here is an ELL student’s poem (she’s only been in the country for about 6 years).
Looking out at the sea
The boats float by all day
With people on them
Enjoying the sun and the sea breeze
The waves are crashing
And seaweed tumbling
Seeing the world pass by
Was like days passing
To see you coming and going
I wait with silent passion
For one sign from you
To join the others
So, when I read about remediation, I thought, “Well, ekphrastic poetry has to be a form of remediation…right?” My student takes one medium, understands the rules of that medium, and repurposes its form to make something new. In both pieces, we understand isolation and alienation, and we see the voyeurism.
Okay, so there’s my anecdote to understand the theoretical. I still have one question though: is remediation also when museums post interactive/zoom-able versions of the painting since that fulfills an unkept promise of the first medium? Now the art is accessible to all? Now we are also able to see all the minute details of a piece as we interact with it? By changing the form, the audience changes (more people have access to the painting) and the experience changes (we can view it in the privacy of our homes or in an academic setting for discussion).
Now as for hypermediacy, wouldn’t the second Dali painting from above (Modern Rhapsody) be a great visual example? or Psycho? We watch the eye watching something else, and then as a result, we remind ourselves that we are guilty of the same thing? So, this brings me to an analysis of one of my guilty pleasure tv shows, You. In the show you watch him watching “her” (whoever the her is at that moment). It’s the same premise as Psycho…through Joe’s obsessive tendencies, we see our own but we are reminded that we are only spectators though the camera moves from Joe’s perspective to a more objective perspective throughout the episodes.
Even the title is an example of hypermediacy:
PERSON 1: Hey, what’ve you been watching lately?
PERSON 2: You.
I think I’m getting the idea, but I’d love validation on this.
Onto the remediation…A few years ago, I was obsessed (as obsessed as Joe from You) with a show called Penny Dreadful. It was perfect miniseries for a horror/drama junkie and an avid reader like me. I read Frankenstein and The Picture of Dorian Gray yearly with my AP Literature classes, and for me, a world where Dorian and the Creature coexist was heavenly. Though the characters had an original in the class Gothic novels of yore, the storyline was innovative. Based on the idea of remediation, because these famous fictional characters’ storylines are repurposed, the novels are reanimated for a new audience.
I’m not going to pretend that I have a definitive grasp of what is and is not remediation across the board, but let’s take a look at this quote.
For Bolter and Grusin, media history is not a series of displacements in which new media (e.g. the internet) make old media (e.g. the radio) obsolete. Instead, new media transform older media, retaining some of their features while discarding others. In their own words, remediation is ‘the way in which one medium is seen by our culture as reforming or improving upon another’ (59); it is ‘the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms’ (273).
For that reason, I’m not sure what every work of art that is based on a different expression through other media is remediation. I think it has to be within a newer form of media. For that reason, I might say that your student’s poem is an adaptation instead of remediation. (I think we may have had a discussion about this before and I was less certain of the difference between the two. This might be a major difference.You can adapt a work into older or newer media; remediation is something newer.)
Hypermediation makes the viewer AWARE of the medium or media involved in works of art. Anthony’s project on vaporwave demonstrates the hypermediated quality of vaporwave. I’m not entirely sure how the series You is hypermediated, although your description of the process is really intriguing. I guess the program is hypermediating our act of watching the program? There is definitely a meta happening there and I can see it bears some resemblance to hypermedia, but how is looking at something an act of mediation (since when we watch a program, we aren’t mediated)?
I’m seeing the line that separates remediation and adaptation better! In terms of hypermediacy, I was think You was an example because in the process of watching the fictional story we become another stalker watching the stalker, which is I think why I thought the title of the show was important. When we say I’m watching You…we become the stalker, and—although we are aware we are watching fiction—we watch the stalker watching the victim. Am I making sense?
Actually, in other parts of the book, the authors say that remediation is a defining characteristic OF new media, but they don’t indicate that this is the ONLY kind of remediation. So perhaps what your student did with the poem was remediation after all:)